The Seakeeping, Manoeuvring and Offshore Department deals with various problems related to ship dynamics in open water. These usually vary from the classical seakeeping and manoeuvring tests to measurement of slamming loads, ship stabiliser tests and tests of water behaviour in moon pools in ships or in swimming pools on luxury yachts. Expertise exists not only in experimental testing of ships and offshore structures, but also in numerical calculations.

Tests on the water ingress in open top container ships are very frequent. If the vessel does not directly pass the test, the test results can often be improved with minor ship design changes. A growing area of interest is propulsion in seaways, related not only to the energy efficiency design index EEDI, but also in general to ship optimization for low resistance in real conditions on the open ocean. In the area of offshore, semi-submersibles, pipe-layers, FPSOs, and floating wind mills have been tested.

On the very classical issues related to ship safety, that is, on the areas of intact and damage stability, studies have in the past been related to accident investigations or to IMO-rule development work. Very demanding testing, e.g. on high speed catamarans or on launch and recovery tests with daughter crafts on high oblique or short crested seas can be carried out. As the seakeeping testing in HSVA is in general very versatile in nature, also very tailor made test campaigns are carried out.

Manoeuvring tests with the CPMC-carriage are carried out routinely in tracking or captive modes. Post-processing the measured data with a system identification algorithm yields realistic numerical simulation of spiral tests, turning circles, Williamson turns, etc., regardless of the physical manoeuvring space they require.

Numerical computations are effectively used prior to and in combination with seakeeping or manoeuvring tests. This improves the efficiency of the testing, thus reducing the investigation time and costs. Together with in-house experience, this combination of physical and numerical modelling can be effectively used to yield reliable seakeeping or manoeuvring predictions.

Our services include detailed investigations for to shipyards, ship designers, ship owners, governmental authorities in Germany and to EU-authorities in the field of seakeeping, manoeuvring, and offshore, in various engineering and research projects.